So my time off ended a month ago, but I haven’t blogged significantly in over two months. New kid + new job + new house will do that to you. However, I spent the time this morning upgrading DevHawk to the new 1.8 version of dasBlog and I’m ready to jump back in.

Back when I was still on leave, my new boss John deVadoss this to say about my new job:

Our current thinking is that Harry will focus on two top-level areas

1. Being the storyteller (Metropolis, Connected Systems etc)
2. Changing the way we evangelize Architecture – its not all about n-dimensional frameworks, with m layers of abstraction, about perspectives and viewpoints, with n-layers of capability mappings, and enterprise frameworks up and down the wazooo, blah blah blah.

I loved #2. Architecture is such different things to different people (more on that later) but I thought John’s description about what it’s not all about was priceless.

From NHL.com:

NHL, NHLPA reach agreement in principle on new CBA

NEW YORK/TORONTO (July 13, 2005) – The National Hockey League and the National Hockey League Players’ Association have reached an agreement in principle on the terms of a new Collective Bargaining Agreement.

Details of the new Agreement will not be made available publicly pending the formal ratification process by the NHLPA Members and the NHL Board of Governors.

It is anticipated that the ratification process will be completed next week, at which time the parties will be prepared to discuss the details of the Agreement and plans for next season. No further comment will be made until then.

Game On!

Update: Obviously, the NHL has to do ALOT to recover from missing last season. Apparently, HDTV is one of the things they are thinking about:

The NHL, which claims that hockey fans are the most technologically savvy of all pro sports fans, will focus a portion of its marketing energies on the cyber world. It will also work to improve the at-home experience for an ever-waning television audience, employing new camera angles, microphones on players and coaches and the use of high definition television production.

“The opportunities that exist for us with high definition television are enormous,” [NHL Group VP of Communications Bernadette] Mansur said.

[Scott Burnside, ESPN.com, NHL Marketing Challenges Lie Ahead]

I’m hard pressed to say that getting HDTV would make the lockout “worth it” but it sure would lessen the sting.

I got interested in computers when my dad started bringing home a terminal to access his companies mainframe over a 300 baud telecoupled modem. The first terminals were paper-based, then we moved-on-up to a VT100. I got interested in programming because I wanted to be able to build my own game like Adventure or Zork. The rest as they say is history and some 20-25 years later I work for Microsoft. I never actually built an adventure game, but if I still wanted to, apparently Rory is teaching a sesson on Inform which apparently is a language for building Interactive Fiction.

Sounds like Code Camp is going to be a blast. Note to self, bug Rory for his slides.

After a six month silence, Dad posted about what he called Business Oriented Architecture (BOA?):

If I had to guess what a service oriented architecture will eventually look like, I would guess that it would reflect the business architecture – Business Oriented Architecture (BOA). Business organizations have evolved over many centuries into a number of common “departments” – sales, accounting, personnel, etc. Perhaps that is a good starting place for services.

John forwarded me a post from Richard Veryard where he comments on Dad’s post:

The issues addressed in my book are now becoming mainstream as the technological agenda of service-oriented architecture (SOA) starts to converge with the strategic agenda of the service-based business (SBB). This implies an approach to business strategy that involves dynamically managing the geometry of the business. (To achieve a fully adaptive enterprise we typically need to implement a variable geometry.) We can find elements of this thinking in some of the methodologies coming out of IBM and Microsoft, although from what I’ve seen so far I don’t think any of these methodologies go far enough.

Hal calls this Business Oriented Architecture. If anything, I’d prefer to call it Architecture-Oriented Business. As Hal indicates, this calls for architectural thinking at the business level, which need to be aligned with architectural thinking at the information/software level.

This comes back around to the whole SOA top-down vs. bottom-up argument. Something I’ll comment further on when I’m not up to my armits in moving boxes.

Jim Newkirk has released an alpha version of a utility to convert NUnit tests to VSTS tests. What he doesn’t mention in the post is that he’s using GAT to integrate this conversion functionality into VS05. Basically this conversion is an “unbounded recipe” which means that any time you right click on an item in the solution explorer, the NUnit Converter uses Visual Studio’s CodeModel functionality to analyze the contents of the file. If the file is a C# file and has any NUnit test fixtures in it, NUnit Converter adds a “Convert NUnit Test Code” item to the context menu.

From a cursory glance at the code (which Jim was kind enough to send me) it doesn’t look like it took very much GAT code to integrate into VS. Of all the files in the solution, there are only three that relate to GAT – the Conversion Action (i.e. the code that initiates the NUnit -> VSTS conversion when you select the context menu item), the Conversion Recipe Reference (i.e. the code that determines if the conversion menu item should be added to the context menu) and the Selected Project Item Provider (i.e. the code that retrieves the selected file from the Solution Explorer). There’s also the XML file that defines the recipes. Everything else as far as I can tell handles the conversion itself and has nothing to do with GAT.

It’s cool to see a real-world usage of GAT and that using GAT is a pretty low-impact effort given the VS integration benefits it provides.